I don't really understand how nostr handles followers and why they get lost sometimes.
The clients that display followers at all are showing different counts with differences in the hundreds. Even though I don't really care about my followers and with most being spam anyways, I'd still like to have a more robust understanding of how clients usually calculate following counts and how recovery tools work.
🤔
You must be using Amethyst. It behave weirdly in many ways.
Amethyst doesnt even pretend to show follower count anymore 🤣
Followers can only ever really be estimated. To count your followers, you basically need to crawl profiles from the known network (all the relays your clients knows of) and see if they are following you. But of course, some of their relays might be unknown to you. Or worse, different relays might have different versions of their profiles. So it's not an easy number to get...
You cannot recover followers, but you can recover the people you follow. Some apps have messed up my follow list. So at some point I was longer following you. Less frequent lately, but that can factor in of course. That's why it's useful to back up your stuff once in a while with things like https://metadata.nostr.com
Hope it helps!
And download the backup
